I plan to use PDAs (palm or CE) as remote data-loggers to
collect environmental information. Two or three times a
day, I want to phone the collected info back in to a base
computer. The options are using a PDA which already has
cell-phone capability or using the PDA to activate the
phone, dial and initiate data transfer ... using it as a
cellular modem.

For several reasons, I'd RATHER not use an integrated PDA/Phone.
They are expensive, if one part breaks then the whole thing is
useless, I'm not sure the range is as good as a 'real' cell
phone and we get a very good corporate price on our 'real'
phones which they might not give for a PDA/phone. The major
benifits of a PDA/phone are simplicity and the extremely low
power consumption of a PDA (these things will be run using
solar-charged batteries).

There were companies selling A/D converters which plugged-in
to the compact flash port on some older PDAs, but I see the
newer ones all seem to have gone to secure-digital slots and
I've seen no A/Ds for them yet. The other option is to use
the PDAs serial port and employ an external A/D which sends
a data string in that way. Of course, the phone would then
have to be addressable using IR or Bluetooth since the hardwire
serial port would be 'hogged' by the A/D device.

In any event, PDAs now seem to beat some of the lower-range
dedicated data-collection/transmission devices out there in
in terms of price, memory capacity and flexibility. If you
don't need a really high sample rate, they're the way to go.
Well ... I hope so .....

Has anyone had any experiences in commanding cell phones
from a PDA running PocketC or OrbForms ? I could maybe use
Procomm on the base PC to arrange an automatic data xfer, or
I could write my own software ... nothing needs to be very
sophisticated or even very fast since I'm not sending that
much data. Reply to group.

if you know java. get a phone with midp. program it on a pc. compile and download it to your phone. best choice would be--phone with usb connection. my suggestion=the old nokia ngage.(old model ...not the new QD)